Troubled to Tears A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On April 2nd, 2017

John 11:1-45

Today’s text is another long one from the . As you listen to it, pay attention to how the two sisters Mary and speak to . Watch what happens to Jesus over the course of this narrative. See if you can note a difference in his tone and language.

Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of , the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.’ Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.

Then after this he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to again.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?’ Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.’ After saying this, he told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but going there to awaken him.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’ Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’ Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow-disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’

When Jesus arrived, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was near , some two miles away, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them about their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ She said to him, ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.’

When she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, ‘The Teacher is here and is calling for you.’ And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come to the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. The Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and go out. They followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’

Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him.

The passage we just read is one of the longest in the lectionary, but ironically it contains the shortest verse in all of scripture. This short verse came in handy for people who grew up in Christian traditions which emphasized memorizing scripture. The verse, in both the King James and the in the old Revised Standard versions, used to be just two words. Jesus wept. Subject. Verb. Anybody can memorize two words, right? Try it with me. Jesus wept. Now, let’s just make sure we’ve got it. Jesus wept. One more time, for good measure. Jesus wept.

The New which is in the pew and from which I read, doubles the length of the verse—from two to four words. From Jesus wept, to Jesus began to weep. Bear with me here, but I think that tiny addition makes a huge difference. Jesus wept is sort of a general statement about Jesus’ humanity and perhaps even the nature of divinity. Jesus cried, just like the rest of us human beings. And if Jesus is somehow all tangled up in God, if Jesus is our clearest glimpse into God’s identity, then we can say that God weeps, too. God is not impassible or beyond suffering, God hurts at and for the pain of the world. I really like that theological idea. That claim has sustained me over the course of my life and ministry, this notion of serving a God who is not distant and unfeeling. Jesus wept. It’s a marvelous thought.

But here’s the thing about marvelous thoughts, and brilliant intellectual ideas and interesting philosophical and theological concepts. They can be great topics for sermons, and doctoral dissertations, and deep late night conversations. But they remain nothing but words, words, words, words until they touch down in people’s real human lives. It is only when what we say we believe in our minds about God, Jesus, the Spirit, the church, justice, mercy, and reconciliation becomes operationalized in how we actually live our day to day lives and face particular issues that the move from idea to reality, from belief to practice occurs. We move from the general idea up here to specific action that works itself out in our hands and feet and hearts. We begin. Jesus began to weep. We begin.

We move from general ideas to specific action when our words about God’s grace and our call to be grateful and generous become auction bids, and yearly pledges, and resources given to help others and we wind up with the bill in our mailbox. It happens when our grand ideas about inclusion become the actual welcome and wholehearted embrace of people of different races and religions and sexual orientations and gender identities. It happens when our big pronouncements about racial and economic justice become actually standing up for people who always seem to get the short end of the stick, even when that means people might not like us. It happens when what we say about forgiveness actually leads us to forgive a real, human, flawed flesh and blood person. It happens when what we say about trusting God actually keeps us from being paralyzed by fear as we move into disease and disruption and new challenges in life.

Something usually triggers that move from general idea to specific action matching the idea. Jesus didn’t just weep. Jesus began to weep. He was moved to weeping. Some particular situation caused him to weep.

Before we go any further, I have to let you in on some of my frustration with the Gospel of John and the way it depicts Jesus. I’m going to be honest with you here. Despite all of the wonderful material in the gospel—the different signs, the woman at the well, the water into wine, the encounter with , the healing of the paralytic, the feeding of the 5000 in John’s account, the giving of sight to the blind man that we read last week—there are times in John’s Gospel when it feels like Jesus is just so far above it all. There are these stretches where he’s on a monologue and it feels like a head trip and my eyes are glazing over as he goes on and on I am in the Father and the Father is in me and the Father and I are one and you are one and if you tried to diagram the sentence you’d be hopelessly lost. I just want to grab Jesus by the shoulders and shake him and say, “Speak to us plainly, man! What difference does this make in real life—not pie in the sky by and by but here and now? Enough of the abstract theology, Jesus!”

At the beginning of today’s text, I felt a little of that old annoyance coming back to me. Jesus gets word that his friend Lazarus (whose name literally means, by the way, God has helped)—he gets word that Lazarus is sick, and rather than rushing off to heal him as everyone might have expected, Jesus deliberately drags his feet. He waits. We know (because we know the end of the story) that he waits because he knows he’s going to bring good out of it. He knows that God is somehow going to be glorified through Lazarus’ death and coming back to life. He knows that God is not going to let death have the last word here. Jesus waits, and we understand why he waits. But it is just a little annoying to me, that Jesus is waiting it seems, just to make a theological point.

When he finally shows up, after Lazarus has been dead in the tomb for four whole days, Jesus gets an earful. First from Lazarus’ sister Martha, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know God will give you whatever you ask.” Then—when Martha lets Mary know that Jesus has finally arrived—she comes out, falls at Jesus feet, and says the same thing, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Then she wept and the people who were with her were weeping and—at least the way I read it—something in Jesus broke. He was deeply touched, and the text says, he began to weep.

There are all sorts of explanations that scholars proffer for why Jesus began to weep. Some say it was Jesus’ Gethsemane moment. He knew that he too would be lying in a tomb in a very short time and since in John he doesn’t have the chance to say in the garden, “Father, let this cup pass from me,” this is his Gethsemane moment. Some say that it is because he himself was quite close to Lazarus and even though he knew he that death wasn’t going to get the last word for his friend, he himself was overcome by the loss in that moment. But I like to think—just entertain this thought with me for a while—I like to think that in that moment, watching all those people weeping and mourning, Jesus realized, “This is not some sort of theological or philosophical game. There are people really hurting out here—and it hurts me to see it.” And the tears came.

In my first pastorate in upstate New York, I buried a woman—our Clerk of Session—who was forty- nine years old. She died suddenly, no warning. Chrys’ husband woke up and she was dead. I buried a woman who was 33. Cherie died with brain cancer. She left behind two elementary school aged children. At both of those memorial services, I had to stop midway through because I was weeping. In fact, I came to be known as the young pastor who cries at every funeral.

Being moved to tears is a holy thing. Now, thank God, not everyone cries as easily as I do. But if we don’t get moved by the hurt and pain of people in the world, if we don’t get moved to tears and action by the hurt and pain of people right next to us, if we don’t somehow feel deeply for people, then we’ve missed something key to the Gospel.

I love, and occasionally return to, what the great Presbyterian writer and pastor Frederick Buechner wrote about tears in his book Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary. He wrote:

You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.1

When was the last time you found yourself choked up? And what is that saying about where you should go next, what you should do next?

It might have been last Sunday in this space, when we heard Pastor Katie bravely telling us about needing to have surgery, which she had this past Thursday. It might have been when you heard Pastor Susan’s story during her Real World, Real Faith talk last week over in the Meeting House— especially as she shared the poem she’d written on her wedding day about her father.

The Sunday before, on Youth Sunday, I found myself with a lump in my throat. I suspect I’m not alone. It was listening to those high school seniors delivering those magnificent, short, wonderful sermons. After each one started to speak, the tears started to flow.

In the days after that Youth Sunday, beginning to prepare for today, I went back and found an old sermon that I’d preached on this text 9 years ago. As I was reading through that old sermon, I realized that I preached it 9 years ago when Sean and Anna Marie Hollar were baptized.

The point of that sermon was that we are called to glorify God—to show the world who God is—in a world where things don’t always work out the way we want them to or the way we planned.

I dropped a line to Rick and Kay (Sean and Anna Marie’s parents) and to Mike and Diane Curry (because Ryan and Laura were also baptized that day), and the upshot of what I wrote was, “Thank you. Thank you for raising your children in the church. Thank you for teaching them what is important. Thank you for modeling being part of the community to them. Thank you for making this a priority. Do you know what you and your children are doing? You are living out the charge in that sermon.”

Just to think about it, even now, makes the tears come.

1 Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary. (HarperOne; May 21, 1993)